Public meetings on foreshore and seabed legislation - Northland, 31 August and 1 September

David will be holding two public meetings tomorrow and Wednesday to discuss how the planned foreshore and seabed law changes will affect you.

Kerikeri: 6pm, Tuesday 31 August
Theatre Bar, The Centre, 43 Cobham Rd.

Whangarei: 1pm, Wednesday 1 September
Cafler One, Forum North Conference Centre, Rust Avenue.

Shocking Night Out

Why cops should be armed with more than just their wits.

Last week I spent a night out with the police in south Auckland. It was unexpectedly quiet. The cops I was riding with joked that Constables Wind Rain and Cold – all members of “Sergeant Elements' squad” – were keeping the bad guys at home.

While it would have nice to have been busier, it was an interesting night nonetheless. Sitting safely in the back of the car, I was struck with the thought that every time the cops make a routine traffic stop and approach a driver's window, they are potentially at risk of having a gun stuck in their face.

We send our police out armed only with their wits and a canister of pepper spray on their belt. Even the baton is kept in the boot. The taser is locked in a safe on the floor of the car. It cannot be taken out without the authority of a sergeant, and it was clear from the briefing the section had before going out to work that permission is not given lightly.

As I watched the squad members who were entrusted with tasers getting ready, I thought about some silly members of the legal profession who had made such a fuss when tasers were being trialled.  Tasers would, it was claimed, be regularly used to intimidate suspects. The possibility that suspects would be tortured by having a taser discharged repeatedly against their bodies was even suggested.

The reality could not be more different. I watched the squad members go through the routine of switching the weapon on – which automatically activates audio and video – and put on record the name and serial number of the officer, and the time and date the weapon was being activated. Each weapon was then locked in its safe.

I asked how often they had to use it, and there was general laughter. The short answer was tasers have never been discharged by police working out of Otahuhu – although persons being arrested have been “laser painted” (the step prior to firing a number of times. Even going that far – which has led in all cases to suspects becoming calm enough to be arrested safely – entails endless paperwork and an enquiry by senior staff as to why the weapon was deployed.

Far from being used as an instrument of torture, the taser is a life saving device. Quite simply, it is only deployed when people’s lives are at risk. It is probably correct to say that on each of the few occasions it has actually been fired, the only other alternative was a gun. People don't die from being tasered, but they rarely survive a bullet in the chest.

From what I saw, our police should have a taser on their hip every time they go out to protect us – including silly members of the legal profession - from the bad guys.

Right to Despair over Suicide Stats

The Chief Coroner has recently called for a debate on whether more details of suicides should be released. At present, findings of suicide are routinely suppressed, and only released if a Coroner thinks doing so will cause less harm than keeping everything under wraps.

The reason for that – at least in part – is the fear of “copycat” suicides, especially if details of how the death occurred are revealed. Such a fear was probably quite reasonable before the internet age. Now, anyone with a computer can Google “suicide methods” - they don't need to read the paper.

It remains a genuine concern that news of suicides may encourage others who are close to the edge.  I have only ever attended one hearing of the Coroners Court, but the details of that day remain etched in my mind, even fifteen years later. One case in particular remains with me. The man in question had become so unhappy that he used two different methods at once to ensure he would not survive. It is difficult to imagine that level of despair.

It appears expert opinion is sharply divided regarding whether greater openness would lead to more or fewer suicides. Apparently a considerably greater number of New Zealanders now kill themselves every year than die on our roads. That is a shocking statistic.

I do not know the answer, but in my view this is a debate we must have. Of all the fears we have for our children, for me the top two are death on the road or death by suicide. We have drastically reduced deaths from the first of those. It is time we looked at the second.

These articles were first published in the Truth Weekender on 20 August 2010.

National yesterday announced that a new prison would be built and run by private entities in what is known as a “Public Private Partnership” (PPP). This has prompted the usual hysterical musings from opposition parties, particularly the Communists (sorry, the Greens), and left wing commentators. In the odd world they inhabit, it is written in stone somewhere that running prisons is a “core state function”, regardless of the evidence that privately run prisons can be good for society, and good for prisoners.

Our only experience with a privately run prison – the Auckland Central Remand Prison for a five year period – was overwhelmingly positive. Compared with public prisons, there were fewer assaults, both prisoner-on-prisoner and prisoner-on-guard, fewer suicide attempts, fewer escapes (one in five years, which cost the operator a hefty $50,000 penalty) and what everyone but the prison officers union says was a much more harmonious environment. It was the only remand prison in the country which had numeracy and literacy programmes for inmates.

None of that matters to the ideological apparatchiks in the Labour and Green Parties of course. Their unchanging mantra is, as always, “state-run good, private bad”. As the architect of “three strikes”, it is actually very amusing how the Communists Greens in particular use American examples selectively – they wholeheartedly approve of “medical marijuana” in California for example, but reject Three Strikes – whose birthplace was of course that state – as the work of Satan (or whatever is their substitute for that entity in their strange world).

I have lost count of the number of times we have heard about two Judges in one state of the US who were convicted of getting kickbacks for sending youth offenders to a privately run facility. The frequency with which this is recycled is evidence of its rarity. I don’t know how many Judges there are in the entire United States, but there must be tens of thousands. And we keep hearing – and no doubt will again – about two corrupt ones. The inference of course is that we may have Judges similarly likely to act corruptly – a suggestion for which there is not a shred of evidence.

The opposition reserves particular venom for the Maori party, which supports privately run prisons. Maori support private prisons because they are the best vehicle for trying “Maori solutions” for high recidivism. There is little doubt that some Maori entity – perhaps an iwi owned company – will make a bid to run the new prison. Although the history of “cultural” treatment programs for criminals has had little success worldwide, I say good luck to them. The one thing we know for sure is the model we have been using for 40 years or so has not worked – particularly for Maori. If a prison run on different lines reduces recidivism from its present woeful level that can only be good.

Except in the “state-run good, private bad” world inhabited by the opposition.